by Jessie Roberts
Amy Grace Loyd describes working as an editor at Playboy:
Working at Playboy does mean working alongside a parade of breasts (real or fake but always protuberant), an opera of breasts, really, but over time, in the course of my weeks and months there, I didn’t remark on them much. We worked in the New York office on Fifth Avenue, near one corner of Central Park and The Plaza. There were no photography studios on site, no auditions held for Playmates or Bunnies. So it was all the easier to believe what us editors and staff writers told ourselves: The women showcased in the magazine were carnival barkers. They got the folks into the tent, but it was the articles, the essays, the interviews and reviews, the short stories, that kept them there. I saw us as misunderstood, as an underdog.
You bet I’d drunk the Kool-Aid. It helped that my fellow editors were among the best I’d ever worked with. I expected some sexism, a run-in or two with sexual harassment, but I was disappointed in this, happily. Certainly sex was in the air, the stuff of endless humor, of puns, double-entendres. You had to be light on your feet. Usually the only woman in editorial meetings, I was especially good at providing straight lines, unwittingly, until I became better at playing along, keeping up. It was infantile but necessary to subdue all the elephants in the room, all the content we had no say over, and juxtapositions of that content, of high and low, that can still make me laugh out loud, still delight me for their irreverence and denial of this country’s determined conservative tastes, conservative everything. We worked hard, maybe harder than most monthly magazine staffs, to prove ourselves, in the hope, however slight, that readers, and the industry we were part of, might see the forest for the breasts.
Earlier Dish on the working environment at Playgirl here.
(Photo by Flickr user r2hox)
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